The world’s largest offshore windfarm off the Yorkshire coast is to supply its first power to the UK electricity grid this week. Could it fill the gap left by a failing nuclear industry? When fully operational next year, Hornsea One will be the largest windfarm in the world. Its 174 Siemens 7MW turbines will generate enough electricity (1.2GW) to reportedly power more than one million homes.

The electricity generated by the turbines 120km off of the Yorkshire coast will pass through one of three offshore substations, before being carried by three high voltage subsea cables (245kV).

Danish developer Ørsted’s project propels the offshore wind power sector to a new scale; Hornsea One will cover 407 sqkm – almost eight-times the size of Norwich

Rapid growth for renewables

A clean and sustainable energy supply, and reducing the impacts of climate change has become priority for countries across the globe as part of the Paris Agreement. Climate change was also found, in the World Economic Forum’s global risks report, to be the biggest concern for business in 2019.

The UK committed to reducing its greenhouse gas emissions by at least 80% by 2050, relative to 1990 levels, but the question remains just how can this be achieved?

Offshore windfarms could help fulfill this. Additionally it could aid the low carbon power gap created as a result of Hitachi and Toshiba recently scrapping nuclear plant projects in Wales and Cumbria. Hitachi followed Toshiba’s move and halted work on the Welsh site earlier this year due to rising costs………

A failing nuclear industry

Last year renewable energy supplied a record 33% of the UK’s electricity, opposed to 19% from nuclear. As technology advances, renewable energy has become cheaper and the logical energy source.

Hinkley C, the nuclear power plant in Somerset is years behind schedule, and billions over budget. Alongside Hinkley, there were five other plants with nuclear proposals: Moorside (Cumbria), Wylfa (Wales), Oldbury (West Midlands), Bradwell (Essex) and Sizewell (Suffolk).

Three have been scrapped and two are yet to be approved. Of the eight sites currently generating power, the Nuclear Industry Association (NIA) report that only one is due to be in use by 2030…….

The renewable sector is rapidly growing, its technology advancing and its costs decreasing, while nuclear remains an expensive and complex option that is becoming less appealing.

Can renewable energy be created on the same scale as nuclear? As nuclear power plants shut down and reach their operational expiry date, their contributions to the UK’s energy mix becomes increasingly irrelevant.

Chicago may be the largest city in the U.S. to commit to 100% renewable energy and has set a 2035 target date. The famous city’s long association with nuclear power says a lot about the future of clean energy Statesside.

Chase Tower is one of the tallest skyscrapers to dominate Chicago’s skyline. But it is not the building’s height, at 869 feet, which makes it prominent but rather what’s in it: the headquarters of Exelon, the largest owner and operator of nuclear power plants in the United States.

However, despite there being 11 nuclear reactors in operation in the state of Illinois, Chicago is moving to a different power source: renewable energy. Yesterday, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel unveiled the Resilient Chicago plan, which with action number 38 commits to “transition to 100% clean, renewable energy in buildings community-wide by 2035”. The deadline for all city government buildings to be powered solely by renewables, first established in 2017, has been brought forward to 2025.

The language of the Resilient Chicago text says “clean, renewable energy”, and the Sierra Club does not include nuclear as part of its Ready to 100 campaign. The new policy is a particularly interesting move for Emanuel, once considered one of the more pro-nuclear politicians in the Democratic Party, and a man who brokered the deal that created Exelon.

Were Chicago to include nuclear in a 2035 target, it would require either buying power from existing plants instead of investing in new generation, or starting new nuclear plants within six years. Given the high cost of nuclear compared to wind and solar, few decision makers are contemplating that option.

The City of Chicago and stakeholders will have until December next year to come up with a plan to meet the city’s new mandate.

Community solar, electric buses

And there are a number of other clean energy commitments among the 50 action points in the wide-ranging Resilient Chicago report. Chicago plans to complete the electrification of its bus fleet by 2040, and the city is also making a push for community solar.

Action 37 states the city will “promote greater access to community solar”, by supporting the Illinois Power Agency’s community incentive programs and by incentivizing community solar through voluntary programs, with the Chicago Renewable Energy Challenge highlighted.

Since the passage of the Future Energy Jobs Act in the Illinois General Assembly, Chicago has seen a boom in community solar, with 1.8 GW of projects applying for block grants in just the last two weeks, more than ten times the amount the state had planned for in its block grant program.

Consumers, businesses and utilities all win with this new distributed clean utility because renewables plus efficiency and batteries is available as a very resilient, near-zero carbon solution to providing power when and where it’s needed at the lowest cost. As these technologies continue to scale, they continue to experience steep cost declines, making the idea of a nuclear alternative vanishingly unrealistic.

Tens of billions of dollars have been spent developing different nuclear power plant designs, and even with enormous government subsidies and guarantees, corporations and utilities do not want to invest in nuclear power. Gates is a large investor in a nuclear firm, Terrapower, which hopes to build a prototype by 2030. If this target is achieved and a prototype is demonstrated by 2030, it could move toward commercial deployment in the 2030s. But we cannot afford to wait 15 or 20 years to scale very-low-carbon energy — and, fortunately, we don’t need to.

Renewable energy has more than doubled in the last decade to provide 20 percent of U.S. electricity, as much as nuclear.

Nuclear power is already a heavily subsidized 60-year-old industry with over half a trillion dollars invested in several hundred large operating nuclear plants, including 99 in the United States. The cost of nuclear power has soared while the cost for other low-carbon power options — including wind, solar, batteries and energy efficiency — have plunged. This is why no U.S. utilities want to build nuclear plants unless they can get large additional subsidies.

Gates’ rationale for nuclear power can be summarized as follows: Given the reality and gravity of climate change, nuclear provides the only large-scale, very-low-carbon electricity source that cost-effectively can provide power at scale when needed. Other very-low-carbon options, such as wind and solar power, batteries and energy efficiency, cannot reliably provide power when needed — especially on hot summer afternoons when air conditioning loads are large.

This same argument was made by nuclear advocates 30 years ago and is even less true today. Continue reading →

Dave Toke’s Blog 9th Feb 2019 Why Hunterston B Nuclear Powe Station should not be Restarted.Presentation made to Paul Wheelhouse,Minister for Energy Connectivity and the Islands by Dr Ian Fairlie and Dr David Toke.

In our view, Hunterston B nuclear power station needs to be
closed for safety reasons, but this should not be lamented because there is
presently a surplus of electricity generation in Scotland, and more is in
the pipeline.

Indeed there is so much renewable energy capacity being built
that Scottish electricity exports to England and Wales will continue to
increase, there will be no significant job losses in Scotland, and Scottish
energy security will be improved as Hunterston B’s operation results in
many Scottish wind farms being turned off at certain times and periods.https://realfeed-intariffs.blogspot.com/2019/02/scottish-minister-pressed-to-back.html

Forbes 31st Jan 2019, Under-reported analysis by the UK’s Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit
(ECIU) has shown that filling the gap left by the abandoned nuclear projects is not just feasible but better value. The government’s own National Infrastructure Commission (NIC) is minded to agree. Jonathan Marshall, head of analysis at the ECIU said: “In recent years Governmenthas quietly cut back its expectations for nuclear new-build, and that’s
looking more and more realistic as the price of renewable generation falls and the benefits of the flexible smart grid become more apparent.

Filling the nuclear gap with renewables would indeed require an increase in rollout, but one that is well within UK capabilities. “With enough focus on smart low-carbon energy, there’s no reason why Britain shouldn’t achieve all its energy objectives despite the cancellation of these nuclear stations,” added Marshall.

Forget nuclear woes and increase offshore wind targets, says boss of leading utility, Owjonline 25 Jan 2019 by David Foxwell The chief executive of one of the UK’s leading utility companies has called on the government to increase targets for offshore wind energy after plans for another nuclear power station were put on hold.SSE chief executive Alistair Phillips-Davies said the UK should be grateful that in offshore wind it has an ‘off the shelf’ answer to the problem of how the country can decarbonise energy cost-effectively while securing jobs and growth for the UK economy.

He is well-qualified to comment on energy policy in the country, having become chief executive of SSE in 2013 after working in the energy industry since 1997, when he joined Southern Electric.

“Later this year our Beatrice offshore windfarm, the largest project in Scotland, will be completed, and will begin exporting low carbon electricity to the grid,” he said. “It is one of many projects delivered to time and budget, which have helped bring the costs down substantially.

“Last year UK Energy Minister Claire Perry set out an ambition of an additional 1-2 GW of offshore wind per year during the 2020s taking the UK to a total of between 20 and 30 GW, meaning it could be the generation technology with the largest installed capacity in the UK.

“The sector has responded, and an Offshore Wind Sector Deal will be finalised later this year setting out the industry’s substantial commitments to the UK’s industrial strategy. The question now is whether 30 GW by 2030 is ambitious enough,” Mr Phillips-Davies said.

“In the coming months, the government will receive advice from the Committee on Climate Change on the implications of increasing its decarbonisation target from an 80% reduction in emissions by 2050 to net zero.

“In light of the IPCC report last year, SSE supports the adoption of a net zero target, and the implications will be a need to go faster and harder on decarbonising electricity as the driver for decarbonising heat and transport.”

Now that UK nuclear power plans are in tatters, it’s vital to double down on wind and solar, The Conversation, David Toke, Reader in Energy Policy, University of Aberdeen January 23, 2019 Now that Japanese giants Toshiba and Hitachi have walked away from UK nuclear power projects that had previously been abandoned by others, it has forced the government to reassess the pro-nuclear bias of its energy policy. Greg Clark, the UK business secretary, has recognised that nuclear power is no longer cost competitive with renewable energy, but don’t expect any extra push into the cheaper technology.

There is easily enough solar and wind energy available to make up for the cancellation of the nuclear projects and to produce the low-carbon electricity required to make the UK’s 2030 carbon emissions targetsachievable. Instead, however, the country’s incentives and regulations favour developing more power plants driven by natural gas. Having hacked back emissions from power by over two-thirds since 1990, progress with decarbonising the grid risks coming to an end.

According to the UK parliament’s Committee on Climate Change, the UK needs to cut power emissions from about 265g of carbon dioxide per kilowatt hour in 2017 to under 100g by 2030. The government had been substantially relying on nuclear power to do this, having originally identified eight sites as viable for new plants. Six projects were taken forward, including Hitachi and Toshiba plants in Wales and Cumbria respectively.

Yet despite much larger government incentives than those available for renewables, most private nuclear builders are now steering clear, having seen the problems with new plants in the likes of the US and France. The only two projects still on the slate are a joint venture by EDF of France and CGN of China – both foreign state-owned companies. They are building the UK’s first new plant in over two decades, Hinkley C in south-west England; while also planning a second, Bradwell B, in the south east.

Nuclear and renewables

Even before the latest announcement that Hitachi’s Wylfa plant in Wales was being suspended, the Committee on Climate Change was already saying the UK needed to build more renewable capacity to reach its carbon reduction targets. Now the problem is even worse.

In 2018, 19% of the UK’s electricity was generated by nuclear plants. With most existing plants due to retire over the next few years, I calculate this may now fall to 10% by 2030 when you factor in the new-build cancellations. Solar and wind generation could easily more than make up for this. For years, renewables’ share of generation has been steadily rising. It reached 30% in 2018 and is due to reach 35% in 2020. But with no new incentives for onshore wind and solar and only limited incentives for offshore wind, it looks likely to fall far short of its potential………..

Power politics

The reason why more renewables are not on the cards is because the Treasury is keen to limit energy incentives. It worries that the electricity price has been increasing – and hence the Treasury wants to strictly limit new incentives, the costs of which are added to electricity bills. This, however, ignores the fact that CFD prices will benefit from the falling cost of building offshore wind farms – the price has more than halved in three years. Nevertheless, the amount of money available to pay for the contracts is being limited to around half that being made available to owners of gas-fired power plants to supply capacity when the wind isn’t blowing.

If all 27GW of offshore wind power schemes in various stages of planning got contracts, I calculate it would supply around one-third of the total electricity requirement. Coupled with the remaining nuclear power and the renewables that are already onstream, that would reach the 75% of power that the Committee on Climate Change reckons needs to be coming from these low-carbon sources by 2030 to achieve the emissions targets. This is not counting potential offshore wind resources which are not even being mobilised, plus large possibilities for onshore wind and solar. Instead, gas-fired power looks set to supply around half of UK electricity by 2030, compared to 40% at present.

One government justification for being less generous to renewables is that unlike gas or nuclear, they do not represent “firm” power – in other words, they only generate when the wind is blowing or the sun is shining. Proponents of renewable energy counter that you can reduce the generating capacity required by increasing the use of batteries to store power on the grid and by incentivising consumers to, say, use more power overnight when demand is lower.

Yet one other option that attracts less attention is that you also get spare “firm” capacity from small gas engines or open-cycle turbines. These can be built quickly and would only be sparingly needed in a system mostly supplied by renewables.

Based on my calculations using Hinkley C and Wylfa, they cost around one-twentieth of the projected cost of new nuclear power. They are alsonearly half the price of large gas-fired “CCGT” plants. Instead, however, the government spends the lion’s share of its incentives pot on large conventional power plants, many of which would operate whether they were subsidised or not……….

The European Commission said the subsidy scheme to be adopted for the project is in line with the EU state aid rules. The 40-year old Fessenheim nuclear plant has faced several safety issues over the decades.

JANUARY 21, 2019 EMILIANO BELLINIThe European Commission has given the green light to a tender mechanism the French government has conceived to enable the construction of solar plants with 300 MW of capacity at the Fessenheim nuclear power plant – the country’s oldest.

The commission said the project selected through the tender will receive a premium tariff under a 20-year contract, and the tender’s budget is approximately €250 million.

“The aid will be granted by the French state and will contribute to the French and European objectives of energy efficiency and energy production from renewable sources, in line with the EU’s environmental objectives, with possible distortions of competition state support being reduced to a minimum,” the commission stated.

The tender was to be implemented in three phases, starting late last year and continuing in the middle and latter stages of this year, and was set to comprise three groups of installations: the ground-mounted PV; rooftop systems on buildings, greenhouses, carports or agricultural buildings with an output of 500 kW to 8 MW; and rooftops with a capacity of 100-500 kW.

Projects selected among the first two categories will be entitled to a premium feed-in tariff while installations of the third and smallest category will have access to a regular FIT. The premium tariff for ground-mounted PV is expected to be €50-70/MWh, and that for larger rooftops €70-100/MWh. Smaller rooftop projects are expected to be granted €80-110/MWh.

The 40-year-old Fessenheim nuclear site, in the Haut-Rhin department of Alsace in northeastern France, is set to be decommissioned by next year. The plant has seen more than one temporary shutdown due to safety issues. One of the most high-profile issues occurred in April 2014, when Reactor 1 was shuttered. The French Nuclear Safety Authority reported at the time that internal flooding in the non-nuclear part of the reactor had damaged safety electrical systems. After being repaired, the reactor was reconnected to the grid in May the same year.

Business Green 21st Jan 2019 New York has embraced the campaign for a ‘Green New Deal’, with Governor
Andrew Cuomo declaring last week he will launch a major programme to build
a zero carbon economy for the state.

BBC 21st Jan 2019 The project has helped businesses in Malawi to generate electricity from
solar power. A solar power project to connect villages in Malawi has had a
“life-changing” impact for rural communities.

The initiative, led by Strathclyde University researchers, has seen affordable energy supply
businesses set up in four villages. The partnership, which has been backed
by a £600,000 grant from the Scottish government, ensures locals own and
operate the equipment. It includes battery chargers and power connections
for other small businesses. Only 12% of Malawi’s 18 million population is
connected to the main electricity grid, which dips to 2% in rural areas.
For the vast majority the main energy source is open fires, which puts
pressure on the country’s forests.

Observer 20th Jan 2019 A tech revolution – and an abundance of wind and waves – mean that the people of Orkney now produce more electricity than they can use. It seems the stuff of fantasy. Giant ships sail the seas burning fuel that has been extracted from water using energy provided by the winds, waves and tides. A dramatic but implausible notion, surely.

Yet this grand green vision could soon be realised thanks to a remarkable technological transformation that is now under way in Orkney. Perched 10 miles beyond the northern edge of
the British mainland, this archipelago of around 20 populated islands – as well as a smattering of uninhabited reefs and islets – has become the centre of a revolution in the way electricity is generated.

Orkney was once utterly dependent on power that was produced by burning coal and gas on the Scottish mainland and then transmitted through an undersea cable. Today the islands are so festooned with wind turbines, they cannot find enough uses for the emission-free power they create on their own. Community-owned wind turbines generate power for local villages; islanders drive non-polluting cars that run on electricity; devices that can turn the energy of the waves and the tides into electricity are being tested in the islands’ waters and seabed; and – in the near future – car and passenger ferries here will be fuelled not by diesel but by hydrogen, created from water that has been electrolysed using power from Orkney’s wind, wave and
tide generators.https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jan/20/orkney-northern-powerhouse-electricity-wind-waves-surplus-power-

Firms say 800 renewable projects ready to plug gap left after Wylfa nuclear plant scrapped Ministers have been urged to drop their block on subsidies for onshore windfarms, as industry figures showed that nearly 800 renewable projects are ready to plug much of the power gap left by the abandonment of the Wylfa nuclear project.

Hitachi dropped plans for the nuclear plant in Wales this week, raising questions over what would replace it and leading the business secretary, Greg Clark, to admit that renewable energy sources are more competitively priced than nuclear.

The wind industry said if a bar on onshore windfarm subsidies was lifted it would allow the construction of 794 projects which have won consent through the planning system and are ready to build. Together they would generate around 12 terawatt hours of energy a year; two thirds of what Wylfa would have produced.

Emma Pinchbeck, the executive director of RenewableUK, which compiled the figures, said: “We have ready-to-go onshore wind that can help close the gap between the low carbon power we need and the amount government policy is actually delivering, and this week’s announcement on nuclear power has made this mammoth task even harder.”

But she said the government had “stacked the odds” against building the onshore windfarms needed to hit the UK’s carbon targets, by excluding developers from competing for subsidies in auctions. Only offshore windfarms can compete for state funds currently.

The government’s figures show onshore windfarms are the cheapest source of new electricity generation. The Hinkley Point nuclear project in Somerset won a guaranteed price of £92.50 per megawatt hour, compared with £57.50 for offshore windfarms in the early 2020s. Experts think onshore windfarms could hit around £50 per MWh…….

The Scottish energy minister, Paul Wheelhouse, said that after the failure of Hitachi’s projects, it was time for the UK to prioritise onshore windfarms and other renewable technologies over nuclear.

ECIU (accessed) 17th Jan 2019 The future of the Government’s plans to roll out six new nuclear power
stations across Britain is looking increasingly parlous, as the Wylfa
project becomes the second power station to be scrapped in just two months.

Wylfa’s demise makes the Oldbury project extremely unlikely to proceed,
while Toshiba has already backed out of developing its Moorside station.

A representative scenario, in which 80% of the energy
output of Moorside, Wylfa and Sizewell C was replaced in equal measure by
onshore and offshore wind, with the remaining 20% by solar PV would entail
an average price of £50-65/MWh, including the cost of system balancing.

This is 13-33% cheaper than the cost of energy from nuclear (not accounting
for nuclear system costs). This would see an additional 11.3 GW of onshore
wind and 5.7 GW of offshore wind capacity, as well as 20.8 GW of new solar
PV capacity. Renewable capacity is already set to increase on current
levels, as more – and cheaper – capacity continues to come online.

Physics World 16th Jan 2019 Dave Elliott: The UK government’s plan to abandon the feed-in tariff
(FIT) system for small renewable energy projects did not go down well,
especially since it meant the loss of the export tariff. Householders who
invested in a photovoltaic (PV) array on their roof have used that to
offset the cost of their investment by selling any extra power they
generated at a reasonable rate – 5.24 p/kWh – to their grid supplier.

However, with the FiT, along with the export tariff, to be closed to new
applicants from the end of March, they will get nothing for any exports. In
a parliamentary debate on the FiT in November last year, energy minister
Claire Perry said she aimed to avoid that situation. It certainly looked
unfair and counterproductive.

Claire Perry has now gone ahead with a
consultation on the Government’s proposals for a new market for
electricity export from small-scale PV solar, configured “so that people
are not providing it to the grid for free”. Under the proposed “Smart
Export Guarantee” (SEG), electricity suppliers would pay new small-scale
PV and other energy producers for excess electricity from homes and
businesses put back into the power grid.https://physicsworld.com/a/after-the-fit/

Business Green 16th Jan 2019, Renewables are on course to overtake fossil fuels for the first time as the UK’s primary electricity source as early as 2020, according to the latest market forecast from EnAppSys. If current trends continue, the market analyst predicts growing renewable power sources such as wind and solar
will generate 121.3TWh of electricity over the calendar year of 2020, pushing ahead of declining coal and gas-fired power sources with a forecasted 105.6TWh of generation.

The forecast assumes current trends of declining fossil fuel generation and rising renewables generation continue at the same annual rate. In 2018, coal and gas fired power stations
produced a combined 130.9TWh, a 6.7 per cent fall from the previous year’s 140.3TWh, the report states.

1.This Month

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Changing climate change“2040” paints an optimistic picture of the future of the environment

The film focuses on technological and agricultural solutions that are already being implemented to help combat climate change, The Economist Feb 19th 2019

by C.G. | BERLIN ……….In “2040”, a documentary which premiered at the Berlinale, Mr Gameau seeks to wrest hope from the bleak reports of climate change. He was inspired by Project Drawdown, the first comprehensive plan to reverse global warming, and the film is intended as a “virtual letter to his four-year-old daughter to show her an alternative future”. “Many films,” Mr Gameau thinks, are too dystopian, and “paint a future that is really hard to engage and to connect with”. “2040” acknowledges that the Earth has set off down a hazardous path, but focuses on the work that is being done now to steer the right course. What, the film asks, could make 2040 a time worth living in?…. (subscribers only) https://www.economist.com/prospero/2019/02/19/2040-paints-an-optimistic-picture-of-the-future-of-the-environment